Prof. Richard Schmidt, Ph.D. attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in physical education, with a minor in mathematics, in 1963. He was an All-American collegiate gymnast on the still rings in 1962. He received a teaching credential and an M.A. degree in 1965 from Berkeley and taught and coached gymnastics until he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois.

Since graduating in 1967, Dr. Schmidt has served on the faculty at the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and UCLA, where he is now Emeritus in the Department of Psychology. During his entire career, he specialized in laboratory research dealing with the control of movements, human performance, human learning, and human factors. He has written four books in these areas, has published over 150 articles in scientific journals, and was the founder and Editor of the Journal of Motor Behavior in 1969. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Institute. Dr. Schmidt was awarded honorary doctoral degrees from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium, 1992) and the Université Joseph Fourier (France, 1998) for outstanding long-term contributions to research in his field, and the Distinguished Scholar Award from a human-performance research organization, NASPSPA. His consulting activities have been mostly involved with products liability, and he has consulted in approximately 150 cases of unintended acceleration for essentially all of the automakers. He has given testimony in approximately 150 depositions, and has appeared in trial (both in State and Federal Court) approximately 60 times. He is currently President of his own consulting firm, Human Performance Research in Marina del Rey, CA, and consults on issues dealing with human performance, human learning, and human factors (ergonomics).